


Smaller than the Stars

by Yourwritersblock



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Aliens are still known and acknowledged in this universe, Anorexia, Eating Disorders, Falling In Love, First Love, Getting Together, Hospitalization, M/M, Not as dark as it sounds but definite trigger warnings, Recovery, Slow Burn, Spock is Still Vulcan, set on earth, unedited
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-14 20:22:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28676634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yourwritersblock/pseuds/Yourwritersblock
Summary: It started off as a desperate need to be better and turned into an obsession with being perfect.Now Kirk is too deep in his eating disorder to even acknowledge its existence despite being involuntarily admitted to Enterprise Eating Recovery Clinic. Kirk isn't the only patient struggling at Enterprise, however, and he soon learns that the brooding boy he shares a room with has secrets darker than even he could imagine.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock
Comments: 13
Kudos: 22





	1. Prologue

Kirk’s gag reflex had long stopped working but his nails still scraped desperately against the back of his throat. The death of his ability to purge had failed to kill his urge to binge, and the seven hundred and sixty calories of cheap cereal in his stomach roiled as he begged it to flood up his throat.

A loose floorboard on the staircase creaked. Kirk froze - someone was coming downstairs. He spat out the last of his failed attempt to rid himself of the food that would soon be clinging to his thighs and flushed the toilet with a saliva stained hand. It took another few seconds to hastily rinse his fingers and slosh water through his mouth.

A knock sounded on the bathroom door. “Kirk?”

“Yeah mom?” his voice sounded normal, all things considered.

There was a pause, and then, “You aren’t throwing up, are you?”

“What the fuck, mom,” Kirk complained, feigning offense, “I just needed to pee.” The lie slid off his tongue too easily but the preoccupation with the weight in his stomach had him brushing it aside.

“Okay,” his mother replied. There was another long pause. “You done then?”

“Yup,” he lied again - he needed at least another ten minutes to even partially bring up his breakfast. Kirk’s gaze avoided the mirror to maintain the delusion that he hadn’t slipped up all the way to the disturbingly high BMI of fifteen and he exited the bathroom.

His mom was still hovering in the hallway and for a moment furious heat spiked through Kirk as he took her birdlike frame in. The slender arms and lean legs and graceful height that she maintained effortlessly but he had to torture himself to mimic. He could only blame his biological dad and his genetics; his side of the family was characterized by much larger individuals.

Kirk’s mom didn’t seem interested in moving, and she chewed on her lip as she scanned over him where he still stood in the bathroom door. “Your dad and I want to talk to you.”

Kirk’s hackles rose. “He’s not my dad. What do you want now?”

“Just -” his mom broke off and cleared her throat, “can we just go to the lounge please.”

Kirk held his ground for a moment before relenting and slipping past his mother, who he could hear scramble after him. His stepdad was already sitting in his usual lazy boy and Kirk all but threw himself into the opposite couch. Between the constant heart palpitations and haunting dizziness, the movement was probably less aggressive in real life than in his head, and he grit his teeth to hide the exhaustion he suddenly felt from the short walk between the bathroom and lounge.

His stepdad somehow looked different from the last time Kirk had seen him, which had been - he suddenly couldn’t remember. Two weeks? They lived in the same house, could it have been so long? Kirk thought of isolated days exercising in the darkness of his curtain clad room. But hadn’t that also been months ago? He was sure lately he hadn’t had the energy to do much more than sleep, and suddenly he wasn’t so sure at all.

“Kirk,” his stepdad started, “we’re booking you into inpatient.”

Kirk’s stomach lurched and tears immediately sprung to the backs of his eyes. His anger always seemed to manifest in waterworks and he stomped the emotion down. How could he just drop something like that with so little preamble or emotion?

“No,” Kirk said, traitorous voice trembling. “No, you’re not.”

“Kirk,” his mom cut in, already crying herself, “Can’t you see how much we just want our kid back?”

“I haven’t gone anywhere!”

“Exactly!” She was yelling now. “You haven’t gone anywhere! A year ago we were contemplating nailing the windows shut because you were always sneaking out to cause some mischief somewhere! Now you don’t even leave your bed unless you’re throwing up the food I have to beg you to eat!”

Kirk threw his arms up. “Why the fuck would you do this now? I’ve gained weight! Just get off my back!”

As per usual, Kirk’s stepdad couldn’t stay out of the screaming match for long and jumped in, leaning forward with a leer. “Gained weight? You look like a fucking zombie. And you contribute nothing to this household. I refuse to keep floating such a fucking waste of space!”

There was a time when Kirk would have recoiled as though slapped, but memories of his actual father and the associated warmth had long since faded and he was too used to the verbal abuse to react.

Kirk’s mom hiccupped through her tears but didn’t defend her son. Instead, she crouched down to close her hand over Kirk’s. “You’re only seventeen,” she said, “So we get to make this choice. We’re trying to save you. Trust me, you’ll be thanking us when you’re better.”

“Whatever,” tumbled numbly out of Kirk’s mouth. A year ago he would have been hotwiring a car and heading for the hills, but in that moment all he could do was drop the back of his head to the couch and close his eyes.


	2. Thorns and Roses

Kirk’s admittance to the Enterprise Eating Disorder Clinic kicked off like a swift kick to the balls. Meeting the in-house psychiatrist was exactly like Kirk had been expecting but somehow worse. According to the smattering of certifications hanging on the walls, the psychiatrist, Christopher Pike, graduated from a prestigious university, very much unlike the ones Kirk himself had any chance of attending. At this point in time not even his intelligence could fix an eleven year streak of rebellion at school. The man also looked suspiciously old for how few years he’d been practising - an amount of time Kirk could ascertain from the dates on the various displayed diplomas. Filling out the new patient paperwork and being ushered into the counselling room seemed like it happened a lifetime ago. Kirk was already counting down the minutes until he could book out and crawl back into his own bed - the same one that had caused bedsores which ate at his hips after five weeks of deciding that facing the outside world wasn’t worth it. Pike broke through his thoughts by asking how he was.

“Well, I wouldn’t be here if I was feeling okay,” Kirk responded. His light tone and loose smile contradicted the words. 

“That’s fair. So, who referred you to our clinic, Kirk?” A standard question.

“My mom and the power of Google,” Kirk said, “She phoned about eight clinics and you were just the first one who had a bed available within three months.”

“I see. Who’s your usual physician?”

Kirk rattled off the name but the psychiatrist had never heard of her despite her practice being mere miles away. Kirk shrugged. It’s not as if he had seen a medical professional of any kind in the last twelve pounds he’d lost. 

The shrugs only continued to rack up as the session continued, picking Kirk’s hollow life apart.

“Well,” Pike said as the last few minutes ticked by on the clock above his head, “I think it would be wisest to admit you to the eating clinic for the total duration of three months. I’d prefer it to be voluntary, but I’m willing to sign off for you.”

“You’re fucking with me,” Kirk scoffed, “Three months? What for?”

Pike’s gray eyebrow arched. “Well, I need that sweater to actually fit you before I can discharge you with a good conscience.”

“My sweater fits just fine,” Kirk said dismissively.

The air crackled with a challenge, one vague enough that it could be from either man, and Pike leaned forward. “So,” he continued, “about that consent?”

Exhaustion pulled Kirk into the uncomfortable chair and he folded his arms across his chest, feeling the solidity of bone through the layers of fabric. Why argue against the inevitable when he could save my dignity? Kirk grinned knowing he had long since run out of that.

The process of forced admission was even faster than the process of meeting with the psychiatrist, and before the end of the day, Kirk found himself being booked into a room with his mom’s tight lips and the kind of tired sleep can’t fix biting at his heels. He flicked the day nurse off when she informed him she had to go through his bag, and in response he was cheerfully gifted a strike for noncompliance before he had even really even walked in, meaning he got assigned a lovely bathroom monitor in the form of a nurse who looked about as pleased with life as Kirk was. He’d arrived in the early evening, and was promptly shuffled off to dinner once the nurses had gone through his bag and confiscated over half of its contents. 

Kirk scanned the tables as he walked into the cafeteria, scoping out the people who would take up space in his immediate surroundings over the next few months. The group was small; small enough to take up three of the two-seater tables spread across the gray room in neat rows. The facility was far too large to only hold six people at once, and Kirk assumed he’d come at a quiet point in time. 

One of the girls looked up at me and waved. Kirk wasn’t expecting the interaction and his hand automatically raised, fingers curled in an almost greeting before he switched to a two-finger salute. Her movement alerted the rest of the group to Kirk’s presence, and two of them turned in their seats to stare at him. Once they’d scanned his frail form they seemed to grow bored and turned back to their food. The nurse led Kirk to the food line, where a young woman greeted him from behind the table top food warmer. The selection looked like standard hospital food, and Kirk chose the least offensive looking pasta dish before settling at a table on his own. Kirk’s usual lack of appetite closed his throat with disgust as he pushed the paste-like spaghetti around his plate. Eating was just another task that couldn’t be done once but rather had to be repeated again and again with the counterproductive aim of drawing out survival. Kirk shoved the plate away and dragged it back towards himself again at a nurse’s pointed glare. 

A woman who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Kirk stood from her seat on the other side of the room and Kirk watched as she made her way over to the chair opposite himself. Her red hair was straightened and sprayed into a high ponytail. Kirk’s hair still wasn’t washed.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m Gaila. We’ll be almost roommates for the next three weeks since I’m opposite you and Spock. He only just got here too so he’ll be needing a roommate.” 

Kirk smiled lazily at the alien, finally managing a mouthful of food, which at this point had been almost mashed by his fork. It seemed so typical of an Orion’s vanity to land her in an eating clinic. It said much of her parents’ vanity that she was hidden away on Nowhere Planet Earth to recover. He ate a few more bites while subtly studying the green-skinned woman through the corner of my eye. She flicked her hair from her face with painted nails.

“I’m so tired, I might skip the next session,” Galia said to Kirk expectedly.

“Oh, really?” Kirk responded with a smirk. Her meaning hadn’t been lost on him and he was almost tempted. A year ago it wouldn’t even have been a question, but the thought of Galia bearing witness to his soft body - the stubborn stomach fat and bloated chest - was off-putting enough for Kirk to cut his flirting short. “I already have a strike so I should probably show up or I’ll have a nurse follow me to your room.”

Gaila laughed, “It would be the most exciting thing she’s seen in this place for a while.”

“Well, here’s hoping you find someone if you still decide to skip,” Kirk replied, raising his glass of water in a quasi toast. Whether he actually cared or not was irrelevant, but somehow it seemed important to everyone around him. His mom wanted him to care about my senior grades, but as long as they were good he wasn’t sure why emotional investment was necessary. The trend was constant, his friends, his peers, even the people he would only ever know for three months in an eating clinic. Emotional investment trumped results, and Kirk’s manicured smile was effortlessly designed to appease the trend.

At the very least she seemed happier with the response and picked up her tray before dumping it by the lunch ladies and heading out of the cafeteria. That left only Kirk and a younger man at the far table. Kirk wasn’t sure when the others had left. The strawberry blond man finished his meal in reciprocal silence as Kirk chewed the food to a near liquid between gulps of water. Something about the food was unappealing enough that Kirk couldn’t stop scooping it into his mouth, images of his thighs expanding flooding his mind with every bite. Eventually, the young man stood and left as well, but the clock told Kirk he still had twenty minutes of solitude left. He headed to the next session ten minutes after those had ticked by. 

When Kirk eventually sauntered into the session, the people from the cafeteria - minus Gaila - were already seated in folding chairs arranged in a circle. A middle-aged man stood by a whiteboard at the front of the room and his face lit up when Kirk walked in. 

“I dannae what took you so long, laddie,” the man said in a heavy accent, “but you made it in time and that’s what matters. Take a seat, we’re about to introduce ourselves to the group! I’m Montgomery Scott, but please just call me Scotty.” 

Kirk dropped into the nearest open seat and half-listened to the names floating around the circle; Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, Amanda, Spock. Kirk paused on the last name, looking up to see the man he would be rooming with. Spock was a tall, aquiline man with skin so pale it was near translucent. Pointed ears peaked through his neatly cut black hair and Kirk’s interest piqued. A Vulcan with an eating disorder. How… human. Spock sensed the sudden attention and snapped his formidable gaze onto Kirk. Something about his dark brown eyes was almost hypnotic and Kirk started when Scotty clicked a finger in front of his face.

“James T. Kirk,” he said.

“Welcome to the group, James.”

“Kirk,” Kirk corrected. The friends that he had once had called him Jim, but he preferred to go by the only name connecting him to his father. 

“Well then, mister Kirk,” Scotty continued, “Today we’re starting off with thorns and roses. The concept is that you ‘ave to present the group with one positive thing and one negative thing that you’ve experienced today. I wo'd na expect you to have too many considering you just got here but anything you have to say will be appreciated. We’ll start with you, Uhura.”

The dark-skinned human straightened her already perfect collar as she considered her words. “My rose is that I’ve gained a pound.” She smiled sadly. “My thorn is that I gained a pound.”

“Understandable that you would feel torn. Any feedback from the lot of ya?”

The strawberry blond man who had identified himself as Pavel Chekov raised his hand.

“Yes, laddie?”

“Well,” Chekov said in an equally heavy accent from another part of the globe, “I think zat although you are sad right now, last week your thorn was that you could not go home, yes? So gaining a pound or two means you are closer to your goal of getting rid of zat thorn, yes?”

“Good insight,” Scotty commented, “An’ you’re right, of course. The sooner you get that weight back on the sooner you all can go home.”

They moved around the circle, and Kirk mostly zoned out the inane highs and lows until Scotty called on Spock. “Thorn: I have been assigned a roommate with whom I will have to co-inhabit for three months.”

Kirk bristled slightly but couldn’t say he didn’t understand the feeling.

“Rose: Mother called this morning from Vulcan and informed me that she is well despite my absence.”

Kirk had nothing much to say and the rest of the group therapy session revolved around coping mechanisms that were unrelated to food.


	3. It Ends In Static

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning for mentions of suicide.
> 
> Unedited as always.

The session itself blurred into the next one, and into the ones in the following days. The nurses forcing food onto Kirk too many times a day all began to look the same except for one who wore bright pink lipstick. It became clear she only worked every third day, and Kirk used her pink lipstick as a tally of the passing days. Days passing too slowly to transition seamlessly back into the real world. It became a game, finding ways to avoid calories and pounds in a place designed to load both onto Kirk. Purging wasn’t an option even if the nurses weren’t vigilant about the patients using the bathrooms, and there were too few patients for the nurses to be distracted enough that Kirk could hide food in napkins and pot plants. Somehow he still managed to squirrel food away without having to consume it, and the knowledge of his rebellion made him almost giddy with power. 

The pink lipstick indicated fifteen days had passed when Kirk finally decided to buckle down and actually work on a school assignment for which the due date had already passed. The moon filtered through the cheap plastic blinds and the hairs on Kirk’s arms stood up as the blue shadows of the room reminded him of dreams he’d had as a kid, finding his father in a bed of stars, illuminated with stardust. The feeling clung to him for the first two hundred words of his essay and Kirk abandoned it before the intro was finished. The clinic had blocked video sites on the wifi, so he couldn’t distract himself with Youtube, and Facebook had suffered the same ban, robbing Kirk of the second-hand happiness he so vicariously enjoyed. Instead, he flicked open a few Google tabs with forum sites he occasionally scrolled through. The vertebra in his back developed an increasing ache as Kirk wasted valuable time with his finger pressed on the down key of his PADD. Eventually, a post caught his eye.

An Exchange for Eternal Happiness

The post wasn’t accompanied by a picture and had no comments or interaction of any kind. Kirk clicked on the link, and the web page redirected to an image of a pizza with the same caption as the title. 

“Well, that’s vague,” Kirk said aloud, cutting the last word short as his roommate, Spock, stirred, and Kirk remembered he wasn’t alone. Due to the room being divided by a set of drawers, the room acted as two, and so Kirk had barely interacted with the Vulcan. Spock was far thinner than Kirk had initially thought on seeing him that first day, and Kirk found himself imagining what he’d look like with those frail limbs when he bodychecked in his PADD’s camera. The lack of mirror’s in the eating clinic was driving Kirk crazy, and the itch under his skin at being unable to just see himself was becoming unbearable. 

It was obvious by Spock’s frame that he’d also found a way to slip around the eating rules. 

Kirk shook his head sharply and focused back on his PADD. The forum post was still open, but ultimately meaningless, as it neither indicated what would have to be exchanged nor could it uphold its promise. If eternal happiness could be made with any exchange Kirk could think of, the whole world would live on cloud nine. Kirk scoffed at himself while he inexplicably flagged the post for future browsing. By that point, the light had shifted from a pale white to a warm yellow, and he pushed his PADD to the foot of the bed and curled up under the blankets, hoping for a few hours of sleep. 

Sleep never came. The half state that enveloped Kirk wasn’t nearly enough to force him out of bed for breakfast, and after a nurse came for his daily blood pressure reading and a kick in the ass to get up for food, he returned and curled back over the warm spot his jersey-clad body had created in the sheets. Kirk heard Spock return from breakfast shortly afterward, and the harsh clap of shower water against the plastic door as the other boy washed up lulled him into a real sleep for the first time in days. 

\------

The day's sleep ran over into another sleepless night. In the splash of moonlight against the wall by Kirk’s head, he could see blood on his skin and the bones he so coveted. Spock had still yet to interact with Kirk outside of their participation in groups, and the steady rhythm of his breathing set Kirk on edge rather than offering comfort. It was just another variable in the zone past the one Kirk wanted to retreat back into. 

He stared at the moon through the open window until his eyes watered but the constant discomfort in his body only grew, making sleep impossible. The nurse hadn’t pulled up the cheap plastic blinds and they knocked and rattled against the window frame. Kirk lifted his fingers to measure the space between two stars, and the pads of his fingertips almost brushed, but the knowledge that in reality, they would never even feel each other’s warmth in the billions of miles between them set a feeling of isolation shooting through his core. His wish to be smaller than the stars could only ever backfire, and yet there it still was, in the early hours of the morning, forcing him to relive every bite he’d consumed the day before. Kirk dropped his hand and rolled over in search of sleep. It didn’t find him, and at four twenty-one in the morning he found himself with his PADD open, screen glowing with a familiar tab in the dark room. Even the image of a pizza with its calorically dense cheese and crust had Kirk’s stomach roiling, and he deleted the image from his saved posts.

Shuffling from the other side of the cabinet caught Kirk’s attention and he pushed himself up so he was standing on the mattress. His head swam and he leaned on the top of the drawers for support. From the Vantage point he could see his roommate sitting in the cramped space next to his bed, his legs crossed and his palms open on his knees. 

“Can I help you?”

Kirk startled at the unexpected question and leaned more of his weight on the cupboard for a better view.

“You doing that Vulcan trance thing?”

“I’m attempting to,” Spock said, “yes.”

Kirk shifted so his cheeks were resting on his fists. As if sensing he had no intention of going away, Spock opened his eyes and tilted his head back to look blandly up at Kirk. 

“Why aren’t you leaving?”

“Lazy,” Kirk said. His fingers felt numb with cold despite the warm evening. He noticed earphones snaking into the Vulcan’s pointed ears. Again, the Vulcan’s mannerisms seemed hauntingly human, and nothing like what Kirk had learned of their culture. “What are you listening to?”

He didn’t expect a response and didn’t get one. Instead, Spock pulled his earphones from the jack and set his PADD on the stained carpet. Soft static filled the room and Kirk suddenly felt much drowsier than he had just moments before.

“Well, that’s about as boring as I thought it would be,” Kirk teased. Spock didn’t respond, sliding his eyes closed instead and returning to his meditation. Kirk started at him for a few moments more before settling back into bed with a shiver. 

He wasn’t sure when he’d finally managed to drift off, but when Kirk eventually woke from a deep, dreamless sleep, a nurse was pulling the blood pressure machine to his bedside. He sat up groggily and extended his arm for the nurse to wrap the cuff around. After a minute she hummed and turned the machine’s screen to face him.  
“This is low even for you,” she commented as the screen displayed eighty over fifty. Kirk felt every millimeter of that reading, his brain swimming in a triumphant fog he couldn’t speak through. He nodded dumbly, congratulating himself on his stolen restriction. 

Between sheer exhaustion and the occupational therapy program for the day, Kirk didn’t know if he’d even be able to stand up - which was an accurate assessment as the nurse caught his elbow on his first attempt. He couldn’t remember what he ate for breakfast that morning - but he was partially sure he ate it - as he moved through the first few hours of the day in the same dreamlike fog before he was pulled out of the occupational therapy program for a private consultation with a psychologist.

Unsurprisingly, the psychologist, Dr. Leonard Horatio McCoy, pulled the same stunt as Pike. The man spent an hour poking and prodding into every aspect of Kirk’s life - his friends, his school career, his family, his childhood. The first two were easy to answer; he didn’t have those and his marks were okay despite the fact he could barely remember what subjects he was actually enrolled for. The last two stung like nettles as Kirk grasped for their answers, unwilling to expose the barbed pain to a stranger, but wanting to feel the anger the subjects always aroused in him. Kirk’s hands were already trembling, fingernails scratching over the back of his left hand until it was streaked with crimson lines. The movement didn’t distract McCoy who watched Kirk through hooded eyes like an owl watching an unsuspecting rodent from deep in the shadows of a gnarled tree. 

Kirk refused to buckle, the back of his hand near bleeding, and teeth gritted. 

The session ended up running over into the lunch hour while McCoy rattled off the importance of familial boundaries while his unnerving eyes focused intently on Kirk. He found himself eventually walking into the cafeteria with his nails biting into his palms. The mood of the room was polar to his own, and he was confronted with Gaila’s smudged mascara; intense sorrow to Kirk’s fury.

“Amanda died,” she whimpered. Kirk racked his brain for the name and came up with the face of the blonde woman who had been in a few of the group therapy sessions. She had left a few days ago, but Gaila had enthusiastically added his number to her many contacts before the woman’s bags were packed.

Gaila didn’t wait for Kirk to ask questions before going on to explain, “I saw a Facebook post from her mom on her page. She didn’t specify how Amanda did it, but she linked several suicide hotlines in the post. She’s gone.” Her theatrics had died down at this point. “She’s gone,” she repeated, with a somber coldness.

The finality of the situation affected the few people in the clinic who had known her, and they huddled around a table with the same dark expressions as Gaila’s. Uhura broke away from the small group and walked to join the two stragglers. 

“I’ve been admitted before,” she said, “and sometimes this happens. Sometimes you just don’t get better. It’s not the clinic’s fault. Eating disorders are complicated mental illnesses.”

Gaila’s forehead crumpled, “What the fuck?” she asked, “I never said it was the clinic’s fault, I’m just - Fuck, someone we were forced to have lunch with is dead!”  
“That’s not what I meant,” came the tired reply, “I was merely saying you don’t need to lose faith in this process for yourselves.”

“Oh,” Gaila spat back, “Is that why you’re a repeat patient? Because this ‘works’?”.

Gaila shook off Uhura’s attempt to place a hand on her shoulder and stormed out of the cafeteria. The interaction seemed to instill the literal dead end that was death into the rest of the patients, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop. 

Kirk’s own temperature was fine. 

“How are you feeling about it?” Uhura asked, clearly concerned for the mental health of everyone ‘involved’ in the situation. 

“I’m obviously sad,” Kirk lied, “I didn’t really know her but death is always hard.”

Kirk’s features morphed into an unnatural frown, but his emotions didn’t match the expression. Death was hard, but how was he supposed to muster feelings for someone he had never even had a conversation with? People died every day, and he couldn’t mourn all of them. He could barely mourn the people he had lost. Like his dad.

Uhura seemed suitably happy with his response, but Kirk dodged the hug she offered him and mumbled an excuse to flee to his bedroom - or some other dark corner if Spock was there - before ducking out of the cafeteria without lunch.


End file.
